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Naturalists have the same human needs for affiliation as those attracted to more traditional worldviews. Naturalism.Org encourages individuals and groups to promote awareness of naturalism in their communities, for instance by forming affinity groups, sponsoring events for cultural enrichment such as philosophy cafes, and organizing public forums related to naturalism.

Organizations

Secular Coalition for America - an alliance of humanist, atheist, and otherwise naturalist groups which pays a lobbyist to represent the naturalistic world view in Washington. Its mission: "to increase the visibility and respectability of nontheistic viewpoints within the larger culture and to protect and strengthen secular government as the best guarantee of freedom for all."

The Secular Web - the web's most comprehensive resource for atheism and secularism, but also dedicated to promoting a naturalistic world view.

Atheist Parents - See the articles there by Steve Berthiaume on naturalism and criminal justice.

Humanist and Freethought Organizations Supportive of Naturalism

There are many worthy humanist and freethought organizations, nationally and worldwide, that take a broadly naturalistic approach to understanding the world and ourselves. Not surprisingly, they tend to be progressive as well. Supporters of naturalism, directly or indirectly, include:

Consciousness Research

The Opposition

Access Research Network This is a high-powered organization promoting "intelligent design" theories (antithetical to naturalism) via their journal Origins and Design, with authors such as Mike Bethe and Phillip Johnson.

Discovery Institute Its avowed mission is "nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its damning cultural legacies".

A terrific debunking of contra-causal free will that explores the humanistic implications of naturalism, by attorney Robert Gulack, presented to the Ethical Culture Society of Bergen County, NJ. Among other things, we discover that Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Jefferson were skeptics about free will. Other good talks by Gulack are here (link is external) (on time) and here (link is external) (on ethics).

Established by the Interdisciplinary Research Centre at the University of Mainz (IFZN), this platform contributes to the neuroethics community by delivering a centralized and downloadable bibliography (including direct export into reference managing tools), plus simultaneously offering the technical means for the whole community to keep it up to date - a "Wikiography" (thanks to Thomas Metzinger).

The Humanist Hour is a monthly one-hour talk show produced by the American Humanist Association. Co-hosted by Kim Ellington and Bo Bennett, every episode explores a different area of humanist thought, from politics to pop culture.

Mainstream science supports a physicalist understanding of human beings and their behavior which challenges traditional notions of self and free will. But a fully naturalistic, science-based view of ourselves nevertheless provides a robust basis for morality, while pointing the way toward humane revisions in our responsibility practices.

Some fear that science, by revealing the causes of behavior, will undermine traditional concepts of freedom and responsibility, leaving us with no moral recourse. Science indeed undermines the traditional libertarian notion of free will, but there are viable concepts of freedom and responsibility which are compatible with a scientific understanding of ourselves. The compatibilist view of moral responsibility underwrites moral judgments, but it also suggests we invest our energies in addressing the causes of evil and criminality instead of imposing unnecessarily harsh punishments which simply perpetuate the cycle of violence.